Zu's musings

Politics and history

I'm not going to get into a big political debate, but within the last 5 minutes of flipping through channels, I saw Ted Kennedy and John Kerry both say entirely false or misleading things about military history. Senator Kennedy said that we've had troops in Iraq for as long as we had troops in Korea during the war, and by the end of the year, we'll have had troops over there for as long as we had troops overseas in WWII. Perhaps on the surface those facts are true, but it totally ignores the fact that we still have troops in Korea and Europe. We're still in a state of war with North Korea for Pete's sake.

Then, generally agitated by what Sen. Kennedy had to say, I flipped around until I came to CSPAN. They had a conference about Vietnam and the Iraq War and John Kerry was talking. He was going through a long list of problems that remained from Vietnam and about 4 or 5 problems in, he mentioned Agent Orange. Now I don't know if he's just ignorant of the facts or if he's overstating the facts/exaggerating/lying, but Agent Orange should be a non-issue. Dr. Guilmartin here at OSU did an exhaustive study on the effects of Agent Orange on the US servicemen that sprayed it from the sky. They would have had the most exposure because they handled it all the time, but the study showed that there were no ill effects.

Anyways, now it's finishing-my-thesis time!

posted by Zu @ 10:39 AM